Teach About 3

Ideology: By preferring nothing to something, ideology amounts to idiocy – but a costly idiocy, fanning the flames of violence, corruption and prejudice. Its presumed perfection prevents cost-benefit appraisals to determine the net merits of alternatives. Its rigidity robs people of the ability to interpret rationally, the power to reason logically, the freedom to improvise ideas, the independence to innovate approaches, the choice to exploit nuances, and the option to explore contextual unlikeness. Ideology can be political or philosophical, religious or nationalistic, racist or ethnocentric; in all cases, it deepens divides, prevents unity and inflicts coercion. It inhibits human initiative, enterprise, industry and creativity. It bereaves people of independence. It corrals people. It dictates cultural norms, social outlook, political directions, and gender equations. It slanders individualism, demanding inexorableness. Since ideology asks of individuals to follow a prescribed path for thinking and acting, depriving them of options to imagine, ideate, improvise and innovate, it robotizes its adherents into absurd androids.

Liberalism is notorious for its incoherence and squandering. In its welfare state, there is no reckoning of individual tradeoff for state generosity. It allows excesses in corporate and union power that acutely deter both economic growth and social progress. Its bleeding-heart social policy squanders public resources, encourages laziness, and inhibits productivity. Its simultaneous championship of political correctness and freedom of speech are inexorably contradictory. Conservatism demands from people preordained and uniform cultural and social behaviors. It insists on doing things the way they were done centuries and millennia ago, cherishing and idealizing the past, which often is less advanced and creative than the present. Its rigidity and orthodoxy inhibit and impoverish people, orienting itself and its adherents to be hostile to gays, feminists, the poor, the powerless, minorities, change to modernity, revolution in ideas, and challenges to tradition. It is blind to disparity in individuals’ ability. It is a lobbyist for corporations, abhors government, detests taxes, opposes unions and retards social progress.

Economic growth is a function of freedom and choice that mold people’s attitudes and behaviors and help them become more industrious, enterprising, creative and initiatory. Since America offers individuals infinitely more freedom than Saudi Arabia, American males outperform Saudi males in innovativeness and enterprise, and American women’s productivity and creativity greatly surpass Saudi women. Saudi Arabia’s surfeit of black gold notwithstanding, it is a backward nation. Mexico is rich in resources, and yet it is poor. In Canada, prior to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, Protestant Ontario was exceedingly more prosperous than Catholic Quebec. In the United States, moderate states have outperformed conservative states in both economic prosperity and technology growth, illustrating the triumph of rational moderation over ideological purity. Moderate California is economically more prosperous and technologically more advanced than conservative Texas.

Ideology – hardened by prejudice and corruption – has produced a legacy of slavery, the caste system, serfdom, anti-Semitism, segregation and apartheid. It instituted India’s caste system and its Hindus scorn for its Muslims. Ideology invented laissez faire doctrine, capitalism, communism and socialism. It causes the chasm between Arabism and Zionism. It caused the Korean War, the Cold War and the Vietnam War. It contributes to ongoing enmity between South Korea and North Korea, between India and Pakistan, between America and Cuba, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and between China and Taiwan. It breeds Sunni loathing of Shiites and Christian loathing of Jews. It fuels rancor between Jews and Arabs. It incites enmity between Catholics and Protestants, between Hindus and Muslims, between Christians and Muslims, between orthodox and secular Jews, between evangelical and moderate Christians, between conservative and liberal Catholics, between untouchable and caste Hindus, between lower and upper castes. The ideological conflict between Democrats and Republicans, between mechanical conservatism and mechanical liberalism, and between the left and right impedes America’s progress, foiling its imaginative and ingenious march toward “a more perfect union.”

Prevailing Paradigm

The prevailing paradigm, saturated with violence, corruption and prejudice, requires humanity to pay an unbearable cost, which inescapably entails poverty and barbarity. Violence destroys, corruption abuses, and prejudice wastes economic resources that diminish the supply, allocation efficiency, and productivity of resources. Destruction, abuse and waste of resources reduce wealth, economic growth and social progress – and, as a result, economic development. Inborn Trinity reduces both achievable and achieved prosperity. It bends income distribution in favor of the powerful, hurting the powerless. It defaces humanity with inescapable poverty, despoiling it of human dignity, human pride and human beauty. It keeps humanity unenlightened, holds it as noncivilized, and corrals it in barbarity.

Violence causes an economic cost. It kills and maims people, destroying and damaging skill, capital, organization and environment. Dead people and destroyed resources forever cease to contribute to economic growth. Since injured individuals and damaged assets cannot be as productive as they were, maimed individuals and damaged assets become less productive, thereby their contribution to the nation’s economic growth is curtailed, reducing prosperity. The costs of repairing damages and healing injuries reduce resources available for new investments.

The economic cost of corruption is enormous, for it diverts resources from public use to personal gain. Instead of reducing infrastructure disrepair and greenhouse gases, politicians give tax loopholes to the rich and tax holidays to corporations. Efficiency maximization requires the use of public resources to optimize public benefits. Since gains from corruption represent unearned incomes distributed to affluent people for whom money is less valuable, less affluent people who stand to gain more from the public use of those economic resources are deprived, at an immense cost to people’s welfare and the nation’s development.

Prejudice commands its own huge price, arising from the use of less efficient labor and more costly businesses owned by a preferred group in place of more efficient labor and less expensive businesses owned by the victim group. As in monopoly and licensing, prejudice perverts competition, preventing efficient resource allocation to maximize productivity. Competition that enables, and prejudice that restricts, free movement of resources are antithetical. The economic asymmetry between unlimited wants and limited resources only exacerbates prejudice. Since prejudice benefits the powerful perpetrators and harms the powerless victims, the result is a substantial welfare reduction.

Irrefutable Evidence

The level of poverty among the world’s 36 poorest nations and in India illustrate the unbearable cost of Inborn Trinity. But it hurts not only impoverished nations; violence, corruption and prejudice irrefutably hurt every country regardless of its stage of development, level of prosperity, or type of economy. The realities like the poor performance of some OPEC countries and the reduction in prosperity in the United States underscore the universality of the crippling economic effects of Inborn Trinity.

Poorest Countries: In the world’s 36 poorest countries – 26 of them in Africa, nine in Asia and one in the Americas – the average daily per capita income in 2007 was less than $2, and the actual income for some might have been as low as $0.20. In 14 countries (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eretria, Ethiopia, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Malawi, Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Burma and Afghanistan), the average was less than $0.99 – in Burundi, it was $0.34. For another 12 (Madagascar, Uganda, Togo, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Gambia, Guinea, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Bangladesh), the average was less than $1.49. For the other 10 (Mali, Ghana, Lesotho, Benin, Comoros, Tajikistan, Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Kyrgyz Republic and Haiti), the average was $1.99 or less.

Inborn Trinity and its exacerbators – in particular, despotism and ideology – has devastated each of these countries. Their despots’ rampant corruption, endless repression, and brazenness in deepening prejudice have irreparably impoverished them. The overwhelming ruin caused by the extreme expression of Inborn Trinity has prevented them from achieving any economic development despite huge amounts of assistance coming from abroad in the form of foreign aid, trade and investment. The lesson of the world’s poorest nations is clear: When Inborn Trinity is allowed to abound, a country will achieve little economic development because the resources it owns and receives through foreign aid, trade and investment will be destroyed by violence, abused by corruption, and wasted by prejudice.